A youtube video of Dustin Hoffman being interviewed made the rounds on facebook about a year ago. In the moving interview Hoffman recounted revelations he had had while portraying a woman during the filming of “Tootsie.” He realized that he would never approach his female self at a party because, let’s face it, as a woman, he was not very “attractive”. And on the heels of that realization, he understood something profound about the female experience and his own bias towards appearance.
After watching him shed a few tears, my mind flashed to an afternoon  when I walked out of my free make-over at Merle Norman Cosmetics crestfallen that the makeover hadn’t worked. I was not any closer to being beautiful. Not one iota. I looked the same fucking way. Only more so. As Dustin Hoffman put it, this was as good as it was going to get. I brushed all that makeup off my 25-year old self and never told anyone.
Dustin’s tears made me grieve a little for my own struggles with appearance, especially as I begin to age. Of course there are all kinds of platitudes about inner beauty and the various forms of beauty. And how old, lined faces are beautiful. They are all true, but it is still a shock to see an elderly version of my mother’s lined face staring back at me from mirrors and shop windows.

In high school, my friend Rab (short for Barbara) would walk around and sing Janice Ian’s song “Seventeen” looking especially pitiful turning the phrase ‘ugly duckling girls like me.’ But Rab really wasn’t an ugly duckling. She had many pleasing features. Nice hair and skin. Big, blue eyes. Radiant smile. But her perception of herself was of someone shamefully unattractive. Well, she was rather a Miss Know-It-All, and this did not procure her many  boyfriends. And she was wicked bright to boot which also probably scared guys off. All the same, her desire to be viewed as attractive was fierce.

When I was barely thirty, a drunk man in his fifties or sixties came up to me at a bar, stared at me for a long second and told me I was sure going to be an ugly old woman. It was so spontaneous that I shamefully felt there must be truth in it. However, when I told my husband about that incident twenty years later, he laughed. He was right. It was ludicrous. What a bizarre thing for a lumbering drunk to say. And I laughed, too. And to laugh together with my husband at that man’s audacious comment did something to assuage that small, decades old hurt.

Aging brings with it all sorts of mania about one’s physical appearance. I seem to be of two minds. On one hand, aging is kind of a mirage. Anne Lamott has written about looking at photos of her younger self and being pleasantly surprised by the beauty staring back at her, but knowing how self-critical  she had been at the time. I think this happens in each cycle of aging. I look back, “wow… then I thought I was pudgy and getting wrinkles, but I looked great! But now…well, now…..”
And on the other hand the waning of my physical “beauty” is very real. When I was forty, I thought aging was a breeze. I thought fifty was good because it gave me freedom to not care that much. Wrinkles were, like they say, prizes for a life well-lived. But now — now the beginning of ‘real’ aging seems to be setting in and I am no longer merrily coasting along.  I have reached the age where, seriously, if Dustin came into the room he would likely pass me by and not see any potential for an interesting conversation. On good days, I envision my future self to be a slightly eccentric, radiant old woman who people might find interesting. However, on other days I feel I am already a shadow on the road to invisibility. The truth is, as I age, I will sometimes be overlooked. Perhaps often. Sometimes by choice. However, I know how to take some responsibility for my experience. Indeed, I can walk up to people and say hello. Or step into the middle of a conversational floor with my own thoughtful opinions. It is also just as likely that in ten or twenty years I will look at photos of my fifty-seven year old self and say, “wow…I looked pretty damn good!”